Porath’s drawing of rejected princess Elisabeth Bathory While some segments of American culture are pushing movie studios to show more nuanced depictions of women in children’s animation, it may be a long time before we see a musical cartoon starring someone like Elisabeth Bathory, a supposedly brutal countess who inspired the Dracula legends. Within a few months of his first post, Porath had multiple agents calling and now has a deal with an imprint of HarperCollins for a book that’s due out next year.

Almost 20,000 people have like the Rejected Princesses Facebook page, and it’s been written up by E! Online, Fast Company, and public radio stations. The project has started gaining widespread attention. They bounced around some ideas in response, and within a few weeks, Porath had drawn up poster-style animations of 12 women he deemed “Rejected Princesses” - women the blog calls, “too awesome, awful or offbeat for kids’ movies.” Surely, they thought, they could come up with better heroines. Porath and some of his coworkers parsed “a lousy click-bait article” that pondered whether Elsa and Anna, the main characters in “Frozen,” were really good role models for young girls. At the time, Disney’s female protagonist, anti-fairy-tale-wedding-ending “Frozen” had hit the height of its popularity. Porath, who lives in Los Angeles, began his “Rejected Princesses” project last June. “People say they want original movies, but they don’t go out and see them, so who’s really doing the rejecting?” “It’s been tried multiple times to do something more adult, more risky, and none of them did particularly well,” Porath told ivoh, speaking about his time at DreamWorks in its early years, when a handful of animated features in a row failed at the movies. But Porath, who worked at DreamWorks before leaving to run his blog, says he can’t fault studio heads for playing it safe and not making animated children’s features about transgender Eskimos, brutal warrior queens, and indigenous goddesses. “Some are heroes, some are villains, some are just weird.” In a way, the movie business is rejecting these women. “They’re not all shiny, happy, kick-butt heroines,” he said.

That’s really the only requirement Porath places on his “princesses”: that they take charge of their own destinies. He’s done almost 40 posters, and has a list of more than 750 potential princesses, all of whom fight their own battles - like Naziq al Abid’s fight for the right to vote, or Ida Wells‘ fight against racism. He also shows his work, pointing readers back to the primary sources for their own further reading. Jason Porath wants to grow an audience for what he calls “rejected princess” – movie princesses who don’t fit the stereotypical Disney princess mold.Įvery week, Porath posts a drawing of a new heroine in classic Disney style, and tells her tale in all of its odd, off-beat, and often gory detail.

Rejected princesses by jason porath